Son[i]a #302
Manuel Sanfuentes on Amereida and Ciudad Abierta
Amereida emerged from a journey undertaken by a group of poets, architects, and philosophers from Tierra del Fuego to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, in the course of 1965. Years later, the experience resulted in Ciudad Abierta, a series of experimental, imagined, collaboratively-built constructions jutting out of vast expanse of dunes, estuaries, and gorges bordering on the Pacific Ocean.
For decades, in partnership with the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso, Ciudad Abierta has woven together philosophy, poetry, and architecture, giving rise to a profound understanding of culture, and creating a landscape in which poetic activity is in a permanent state of latency and can happen.
The journeys, the rounds, the phalènes,the ha lugar (“there is room”) and “returning-to-not-knowing” are just some of the elements that shape an educational edifice whose characteristics are difficult to pin down, because they reveal themselves through activity, as it is taking place. Life, work, and study are vital spheres that are called upon to merge so as to dissolve their internal boundaries.
In this podcast, Manuel Sanfuentes talks about the tradition of the troubadours and the journey to the inland sea, about interruptions, gerunds, and roaming, about impropriety, hospitality, and cemeteries; about learning by doing, the world’s trades, and the poetic echoes that prevent doing from becoming mere doing. We also talk about how to organise an agora based on consent rather than democracy, of which the only record that remains is orality.
Andrea Valdés
In this podcast we talk to with writer and researcher Andrea Valdés about pure writing, about heterodoxy, and about spatial optimism. We open up the metaphor of soft tools, and the semantic resonance of organs—be they tongues or genitals—trapped by the technological rudiments of machines. We discuss the use of tape recorders, orality and writing, and the research of Rivolta Femminile self-awareness groups, which tried to find a space for a different kind of speech in a private, female-only environment. The conversation was recorded at Hangar in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, as one of the first moves towards a line research that Andrea had continued to work on to this day.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Chilean poet Manuel Sanfuentes about Amereida and Ciudad abierta that we were unable to include the first time around. Amereida emerged from a journey undertaken by a group of poets, architects, and philosophers from Tierra del Fuego to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, in the course of 1965, and concluded with the collective and utopian project of Ciudad Abierta, in Valparaiso.
Zenaida Osorio
Zenaida Osorio provides a critical reading of the official account of Radio Sutatenza and of the representations of peasants in the archive. Through this case study, Zenaida reflects on the contrast between the national images (in this case Colombian) that are considered legitimate by networks of civil servants, media producers, and academic researchers.